Tom Bottomley, director, programmatic at Journey Further, takes a dive into digital-out-of-home (DOOH) advertising. He examines the value programmatic can add to DOOH, the importance of omnichannel measurement, multi-market strategy and activation, as well as how we sees programmatic DOOH evolving within the coming years.

How can marketers leverage traditional DOOH advertising for maximum performance? 

DOOH provides advertisers with a real world canvas in order to deliver their brand messages to audiences. It's great for driving reach, building trust, and delivering impact at scale. It’s able to incorporate an extra level of relevancy, ensuring a greater degree of contextual relevancy with your audience. For example, using the same screen you know your audience will pass by on the way to work (morning), at lunch time (midday), and on the way home (evening) to serve 3 different messages at different times of the day as you know the mood will be different. Adding this extra level of relevancy adds value to the audience and will help the message land better and drive better performance. This is on top of the contextual relevancy of the screen in general, such as retail placement in a shopping mall which you can still get from traditional OOH.

Using DOOH screens in a creative way is a great way to maximise the impact and attention of your ad and drive higher performance metrics. One of the core benefits of DOOH vs offline is the ability to use animating creatives to make your ad stand out – maximising attention and driving better results. Use the digital canvas to your advantage! Increasingly, DOOH sites are incorporating 3D technology to really make creatives stand out from the frame. It's something not a lot of advertisers are doing at the moment so it is a great way to capture eyeballs and stand out. 

By integrating DOOH into your wider marketing efforts you can help build frequency and make performance marketing channels work harder. DOOH can be a great primer for a wider campaign, with the first exposure coming from DOOH subsequent exposures drive higher ad recall and higher brand association – meaning some of the heavy lifting has already been done before they see the ad on another channel. 

Finally, the trick is being able to accurately measure the impact. Designing a measurement framework that allows for control and exposed conditions to isolate your DOOH activity enables you to measure the impact of the channel. 

How can programmatic enhance marketers’ DOOH ad campaigns? How much value can it add? 

The most exciting way programmatic can enhance DOOH is through enhanced creativity. Programmatic offers a lot more flexibility, which in turn enables advertisers to deliver messages that are much more relevant to a specific moment. This presents a wealth of opportunities to get creative.

Personalisation is a key benefit, with the opportunity to incorporate multiple data signals in real time into a creative. In some cases, you can build multiple layers of personalisation into the creative which ultimately drives effectiveness. 

This could look like incorporating weather, a product feed, time of day and a location which align, to offer someone a cold drink on a hot day after work round the corner. Or, more sophisticated applications like targeting a nearby event, building a custom feed and pulling in real time information as it's announced. Relevance is most important. This is how you can improve the daily lives of your audience. 

Another way programmatic can add value is through incorporating multiple data sets in campaigns, this can be used for both targeting and measurement. The number of data sources available in programmatic enable a wealth of targeting options, so advertisers can use these to get in front of the right audience at the right time, in ways that traditionally just weren't possible. With ads only being shown at the right time, wastage can be dramatically reduced. 

This data can also help you with measurement as well. Where traditional out of home may have had challenges with measurement, programmatic enables advertisers to really drill down and understand the effect the channel has had and as part of an omnichannel campaign too. By being able to ingest multiple data sources and through sophisticated ID graphs we’re now able to tie back an OOH exposure to a digital action helping advertisers understand the impact of activity, while feeding this data back into campaign optimisation too. 

How important is omnichannel measurement? 

With so many opportunities to reach audiences throughout the day and across so many different channels and platforms – omnichannel measurement is the holy grail for brands.

Advertisers really want to understand what is working for them, and being able to isolate a channel’s impact for a client's bottom line is where we can add the value. It's important to remember that omnichannel campaigns are so effective because we can deliver brand messages sequentially, across different contexts, using different data sets and with universal frequency to ensure the right amount of exposure. Measurement across all channels is really what helps us understand what is working, but more importantly why.

Should brands always aim for multi-market strategy and activation?

Yes and no! Where brands operate in multiple markets it's really important to have consistent branding and an overarching message across markets to really reinforce who you are as a brand. DOOH is a really good medium for distributing consistent branding with the formats and placements being so consistent across markets, be that urban panels, street furniture or retail. 

But there will be nuances in different markets which are important to address. This could be different consumer behaviors, different habits, different climates, different products or different cultures.

It is also likely that your competitor set will differ between markets and your market share will fluctuate as a result as well. Your investment, coverage and even bidding can all be affected by this and is something that should be incorporated into your multi-market strategy. 

How do you see programmatic DOOH evolving within the next five years? 

I think the amount of investment in pDOOH will inevitably increase, and with more investment generally comes greater innovation. 

We should see an increase in the amount of inventory available and in more locations. Media owners will want to better monetise their inventory and attract more buyers which will mean investing more in the existing inventory to digitise, something we have already seen over the last four or five years. I expect to see more screens in different locations, with advertisers wanting to secure more contextually relevant inventory for their buys. 

We’re also likely to see an increase in the amount of interactive screens, as well as their sophistication. I also expect to see increased use of augmented reality to encourage audience participation within the creatives, such as trying on clothes or stepping inside the screen for a different kind of experience – bought and delivered with the flexibility of programmatic. 

Plus, of course, it wouldn't be a future facing question without talking about how programmatic DOOH will be incorporating AI. You could definitely see some chatbot type functionality coming into DOOH, but also using AI to match creative delivery to the addressable audience in the vicinity of the screen. It would be a nice move from the SSPs to use something like this as a way to streamline the buying as well, priortising relevant advertisers in the auction and using AI to facilitate this and give audiences a better experience while making creatives work harder.

For a deeper examination of the topic, download our deep dive on programmatic DOOH here, in association with JCDecaux. The report shares insights into the power of programmatic DOOH from eight top brands, exploring how it can be harnessed for maximum impact.

You can also find JCDecaux's Programmatic Intelligence Hub here.